How Google is Connecting Keyword Relevance to Websites through More than Just Domain Names - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

We're seeing Google continue to move beyond just reading pages, instead attempting to truly understand what they're about. The engine is drawing connections between concepts and brand names, and it's affecting SERPs. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains just what Google is doing, and how we can help create such associations with our own brands.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how Google connects keyword relevance to websites, particularly how they do this beyond just the domain name.

Obviously, for a long time Google looked at the name of a particular website and the queries that were entered and might rank that site higher if the domain name had some match with the query. We called this the exact match domains or the partial match domains.

For a long time, they did have quite a bit of power. They've gone down dramatically in power. These days MozCast is reporting 2.5% to 3% of domains that appear in the top 10 over many thousands of search results are exact match domains. It used to be above 7% when we started MozCast. I think before that it was in the 12%, 13%, or 14%. So it's gone way, way down over the last few years.

Google has gotten tremendously more sophisticated about the signals that it does consider when it comes to applying relevance of keywords to a particular domain name or to a particular website.

I'll give you some examples. One is RealSimple.com. If you're someone who does searches around home organization or gadgets for the home, or especially quick recipes, not like the long, drawn out recipes, but like 10, 15 minute recipes, cleaning products, physical fitness and workouts, makeup and beauty, all of these topics Real Simple always seems to rank on the first page, at least somewhere. I'm not talking about these specific terms, but anything related to them.

It's almost like Google has said, "You know what, when people are searching for cleaning products, we feel like Real Simple is where they always want to end up, so let's try and find a page that's relevant on there." Sometimes the pages that they find are not particularly excellent. In fact, some of the time you will find that you're like, "That doesn't even seem all that relevant. Why are they showing me that page for this query? I get that Real Simple is a good site for that usually, but this doesn't seem like the kind of match I'm looking for."

You'll see very similar things if you look at Metacritic.com. Metacritic, of course, started with games. It's gone into movies and now television. They essentially aggregate and assemble, sort of like Rotten Tomatoes does and some other sites like that, they'll assemble critic reviews and user reviews from all over the place, put them together and come up with what they call a METASCORE.

METASCORES are something that they rank very well for. But around all of these pop culture mediums, PC game reviews, critics opinions on games, PlayStation games, TV show ratings, movie ratings, they always seem to be in the top 10 for a lot of these things. It doesn't have to be the broad PC game or TV show. You can put in the name of a television show or the name of a movie or the name of a game, and it will often show up. That seems to be, again, Google connecting up like, "Oh, Metacritic. We think that's what someone's looking for."

You can see this with all sorts of sites. CNET.com does this all the time with every kind of gadget review, electronics review. Genius.com seems to come up whenever there's anything related to lyrics or musical annotations around songs.

There's just a lot of that connection. These connections can come from a number of places. It's obviously not just the domain name anymore. Google is building up these connections between terms, phrases and indeed concepts, and then the domain or the brand name probably through a bunch of different inputs.

Those inputs could be things like brand and non-brand search volume combined together. They might see that, gosh, a lot people when they search for song lyrics, they add "genius"' or "rap genius." A lot of people who search for quick recipes or cleaning products, they add "Real Simple" or "Martha Stewart." Or if they're searching for PC games they look for the Metacritic score around it. Gosh, that suggests to us maybe that those domains, those websites should be connected with those search terms and phrases.

Probably there's some aspect of co-occurrence between the brand name and/or links to the site from lots of sites and pages on credible sources that Google finds that are discussing these topics. It's like, "Oh, gosh, a lot of people who are talking about cleaning products seem to link over to Real Simple. A lot of people who talk about cell phone reviews seem to mention or link over to CNET. Well, maybe that's forming that connection."

Then where searchers on these topics eventually end up on the web. Google has access to all this incredible data about where people go on the Internet through Chrome and through Android. They can say, "Hmm, you know, this person searched for cleaning products. We didn't send them to Real Simple, but then eventually they ended up there anyway. They went to these other websites, they found it, maybe they typed it in, maybe they did brand search, whatever. It seems like there's an affinity between these kinds of searchers and these websites. Maybe we need to build that connection."

As this is happening, as a result of this, we feel as marketers, as SEOs, we feel this brand bias, this domain bias. I think some of the things that we might put into brand biasing and domain authority are actually signals that are connections between the domain or the brand and the topical relevance that Google sees through all sorts of data like this.

As that's happening, this has some requirements for SEO. As SEOs, we've got to be asking ourselves, "Okay, how do we build up an association between our brand or our domain and the broad keywords, terms, topics, phrases, so that we can rank for all of the long tail and chunky middle terms around those topics?" This is now part of our job. We need to build up that brand association.

This is potentially going to change some of our best practices. One of the best practices I think that it immediately and obviously affects is a lot of the time Metacritic might say, "Hey, we want to target PC game reviews. We've got this page to do it. That's our page on PC game reviews. All these other pages, let's make sure they don't directly overlap with that, because if we do, we might end up cannibalizing, doing keyword cannibalization."

For those broad topics, Metacritic might actually say, "You know, because of this functionality of Google, we actually want a lot of pages on this. We want everyone, we want to be able to serve all the needs around this, not just that one page for that one keyword. Even if it is the best converting keyword and our content resources are limited, we might want to target that on a bunch of different pages. We might want to be producing new content regularly about PC game reviews and then linking back to this original one because we want that association to build up."

Other best practices that we have in SEO are things where we will take a keyword and will essentially just make our keyword research very limited to the ones that have produced returns in our paid search account or in our advertising. That also might be unwise. We might need to think outside of those areas and think, "How can we serve all of the needs around a topic? How can we become a site that is associated with all of the keyword topics, rather than just cherry picking the ones that convert for us?"

That might get a little frustrating because we are not all content factories. We are not all big media brand builders. But these are the sites that are dominating the search results consistently, over and over again. I think as Google is seeing this searcher happiness from connections with the brands and domains that they expect to find, that they want to find, they're going to be biasing this way even more, forcing us to emulate a lot of what these big brands are doing.

All right, everyone. Look forward to some great commentary, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

One word I'd add to the "connection" conversation is Hummingbird and in particular, Google's suggested pre-set search terms drop-down.

As Gianluca Fiorelli's excellent post states Hummingbird is "not a newer optimization of the indexation process, but to better understand the users' intent when searching, thereby offering the most relevant results to them."

Brands in and off themselves are entities, as are their staff and every individual audience "engager" (aka identities).

When Google re-built their algo engine with Hummingbird, they devised a way to not only match complex search queries based on implied or explicit intent, they also found a way to research and monitor which terms (especially questions) drove searchers to SERPs (from those pre-set queries) and ultimately landing pages.

As Google collects the Hummingbird "search journey" data, its understands better which queries and questions are best answered by specific websites.

Therefore in order to build a brands content around a selection of queries and/or questions, website owners should ensure their content answers (as fully as possible) a pre-set search query, as Hummingbird has done most of the work for them in figuring out which questions should be asked to elicit the most comprehensive answers.

When websites do this really well (with media, filters and downloads etc) regardless of the market-place, relevancy wins (hands-down) over popularity, for it is relevancy that fuels search satisfaction and drives Hummingbird.

A good example is as follows (based on Google UK search via Chrome incognito - no history):

1) "where can I buy" implies a store - and this page's SERP result also shows "Philips Cassette Player - Black" and "Sony CFDS50B CD and.." within its SERP listing - a perfect destination for "where" as 3 links are provided from this SERP item. Oh and "buy" is included in the Argos pages Title Tag too. Amazon's doesn't - so round one to Argos..

2) The emphasis here is "how" and not "where" - one of the reasons Google see's this page more relevant than Amazon's is that Argos includes a "Digital Audio Buying Guide" link at the bottom left - a perfect destination for a "How" query. Also think about UX.. :)

3) The emphasis is on "cheapest" here and is wholly price based. One of the reasons Google see's this page more relevant than Amazon's is that they list (mostly) the items in price order from cheapest (above fold) to dearest (below fold) - plus the two they recommend at the top are two of the cheapest. No such luck with Amazon as their page doesn't provide prices in any order whatsoever - so a perfect destination of a "cheapest" - Argos wins again :)

However..

4) Amazon's page wins this battle. Comparing both pages, Amazon's items have a specific or implied colour for EVERY item on the page, except the "NAD C 516BEE CD PLAYER" (well below the fold, I might add). The Argos page has 15 without colour descriptions.

So, to sum this all up: when looking to rank highly for a selection of queries, in addition to considering "connections", also research Google's suggested queries (Hummingbird) and who they show in the SERPs when these pre-set queries are used.

I want to tell you something that I saw a couple of weeks ago in regards of searches for reviews.I was looking for an early review of Fifa15 for PS3, the issue with this search was that about the 98% of websites were talking only of PS4 and X1 editions. However, my searches gave among the very first results websites with exact URL page or domain match. The funny thing was those pages were published months before that the game was announced. they created those pages/website in order to rank for those keywords. Indeed, one of them was an eCommerce site to sell pre-order of that game.

My experience was horrible, as I was looking for info to understand the differences between the old gen and new gen editions and I was not upset, but a bit sad till I saw - if I remember well - as 4th or 5th result Metacritic! I though wow! Now I can read what I was looking for!But I was young and naive. There wasn't anything useful for me there! Metacritc used the same strategy of those spammers! they created that pages months before anyone could write a review. They do for any game, movie, tv show etc I can't find a page for Fifa16 right now, but they have already published more than one page for Batman Arkham Knight which will be available only on the 22/06/2015.

So my question is:

do you think this strategy in somehow helps the association brand/exact keyword more than the broad keyword such as "pc game review" or "ps3 game reviews"?

right now I have just done the same search, and the first result is Metacritic then IGN, Gamespot and "trustedreviews.com". So google got rid of the most spammy sites, but the empty page of metacritc is still there, although nothing has changed so far in its content!

None of those pages is relevant for my query, the 8th site "gamersftw" has a review of the demo, although it's the PC demo, which is the only page with a piece of content, the other pages are there to announce when FIFA15 will be released.

After your post, I'm very curious to see that SERP in a month, the game will be released in EU the 26th of Sept.

Yeah - folks jumping the gun on upcoming events/releases is definitely a clever SEO strategy that can sometimes be frustrating for searchers. I think it will be interesting to see whether Google catches on after the release and starts promoting the sites that have the real review, or if those powerful domains continue to rank because of the associations and links they've built up prior.

If you do plan to 'jump the gun' and create content around a topic, or product, or service etc, that is 'up coming' - just make sure to really research it out as much as possible, competitors, the search landscape, rankings, etc and, try and get insight on it that no one else has, and provide real value to the consumer. This has gone as far as trying to find out who the developer was on a product, and get 1st hand insight and reviews on the products features and upcoming release. It's a workload though!

A further tactic I've used is going as far as reaching out to other sites/companies/resellers and getting them the product (after it launches or offers a pre-launch purchase in advance type deal). I then ask them if I could use their site/link/sales product page, and provide a link to their site - allowing the seller to amplify their reach (to target consumers directly looking for the product/service/etc) through my top organic listings. This also allowed them to connect with people looking to buy right away - making for a better end user experience. It's a great win-win situation. As the sites I've worked on aren't directly related to 'sales' and are more directly related to 'reviews', as Rand mentions, I didn't see a problem with this strategy when executing.

So far, very successful and a win-win in many ways. By providing a better user experience to the searcher - they find what they are looking for (to buy), you get to build relationships with other sites who now want to work with you more :), building links (no-follow) for best practice, and relating that to the keyword relevance of the search, and getting people, ultimately, to the product they want to purchase - without compromising the end goal user experience.

Would you agree that one of the key takeaways of this then is not to change your domain unless it is absolutely necessary because you could lose the 'association' value even if link value is requisitioned via 301s?

Or in a domain move, if done properly - e.g. via WMT/301s etc etc - could the association history travel to the new location?

Depends... the shift from SEOmoz to Moz can teach us that rebranding (hence changing also the domain name) can be achieve successfully.

It teaches us that we should start incempting it in the mind of your users much before you do it. I don't think it was casual, for instance, that already one year before the domain change and rebranding took place, that Rand and almost all the Moz Staff were referring to SEOmoz as "Moz".

From an SEO point view this turns out with people starting and increasing searching you for that new brand name too... a prove is also that domains' squatters also start buying your "new brand" name domains if they can :D

Yes, I followed Moz' change carefully when that happened. I have no doubt that still many many of Moz' links point to SEOmoz, so the co-occurance question is kind of answered.

Rebranding isn't something which should be done lightly or quickly - and the references to customers/interested parties - make all the difference. When we rebranded 2 years ago, we had to boost awareness - as you would - and had to make sure that branded searches were also improving as a sign of that. Still waiting for our knowledge graph entry however ;)

+1 Gianluca - we seem to have carried the associations over from SEOmoz to Moz very nicely. I agree that rebranding shouldn't be done lightly, but I think you can continue to keep the connections (semantic and otherwise) in a properly executed domain move.

If the site transition is done correctly, would you really lose the association?

Or just dilute it (those from links, that is)? If the content on your website is the same and still contains all the same references and occurrences, I'm not sure you'd actually lose the content-based association.

I think that this is not exactly what Martin was asking, Brady. I think the real doubt he was having was about all those co-occurences and mentions to the previous brand that, obviously, aren't counted in a 301 redirection to another domain name/brand name.

For that reason, using the SEOmoz/Moz example, I was saying that quite probably one of the SEO tasks now is also to work with Digital PR in order to effectively helping Google understanding that the old Entity and the new one are the same also when it comes to not-linked assets.

Not really so: Moz, as entity, can mean many things, for instance it's the nickname of Morrisey or it is also how the Mozilla community refers itself to. Therefore the risk of a failed disambiguation was high, and Moz was clever in working on the rebranding even before it was official also for solving that issue.

My takeaway from your WBF is that we need to be creating content across the eco-system of keywords,concerns and interest related to a topic. You are right about the implications for SEO strategy, but I think the key issues are going to be getting client buy-in for the increasing of content resources and getting them to shift away from a narrow focus on a few "money" terms.

Content remains a hard thing to show ROI on in the short-term, especially for companies with a non-digital or direct marketing background, so we are going to have to have a lot of conversations about why building more pages (or even optimizing more pages) is worth it to the bottom-line. With regard to "money" terms -- the ones that the VPs and C-levels seems to obsess about -- we will need to show them how these additional topics are supportive of the brand.

Thanks for the video. I might even use it for some training.

P.S. Is it just me, or does the tactical implications feel similar to conversations we were having in the early-00s? This type of thinking is what got us into the content farming craze. You should maybe add a note that people need to ensure that the broader content creation and optimization retains a high-level of quality.

Yeah - I think it's substantively different from the early content farming techniques, because those were filled with such thin content that didn't rely on earning links/shares/engagement, but simply used the power of raw domain authority (links to the site predicting crawl rate and rankings) and PageRank flow. This new era is really about serving the user's intent and earning quality and authority signals for every page you put out.

Of-course Mike. I know it is easier to notice. But I was talking about pure EMD for very high competition keywords.

Take a case. If I search 'honeymoon destinations in India' in Google.co.in, you will find the best example of EMD have you ever seen. I was ranking on top for this keyword for last one year. Now from last month someone created a exact match domain(partial) and rank higher than me. Owner also verified Google local listing for the same and ranking higher for this comptitive keyword; not even ranking higher my blog, it is also ranking higher than India's top travel websites including About.com(high authority site).

So, here is only one concern, EMD is working and websites which have good value losing their visibility in SERP :(

Has anyone at MOZ researched the correlation between brand dominance and Adwords spending? I always like to follow the money before I make final conclusions. Thx! BTW Rand, I saw, you present again at Inbound. Best presentation skills I've ever experienced. Kudos to u...

EMD was that update, albeit it was something that Google rolled out just for Google.com and English queries (and I'm shaking my head about why it never rolled it out in all the other languages and regional Googles, still so dominated by EMDs).

This is essentially another component of the move towards SEO being a holistic marketing exercise. As Google gets more sophisticated and learns to map phrases and ideas to websites, the branding and messaging side becomes more important and the technical details (think, for instance, about the example that Rand gives of not worrying so much about keyword cannibalization) become somewhat less of a big deal.

The keyword + brand search volume signal is not something I'd previously considered, but I guess that mirrors the way most people suspect that Google affords somewhat "arbitrary" (in a digital sense, anyway) ranking boosts to major offline brands.

I am one of your fan WBF but just came to share my opinion here for the first time. Metacritics is one of the best examples to determine how important is to co-relate your keyword and brand name as Google is very much concern about the connection between the keyword and brand name.

As a part of SEO from last 4+ years, I observe these days, that's why using branded keywords or Brand + Keyword is important. With the great piece of content (which is one of the most important) that people looking can make it possible for you. And this is why most of experts are suggesting to focus on brand instead of exact anchors.

And I agree with a point of Gianluca has covered that "semantic understanding of the web documents is giving more power to this hability it already had."

Great post.. this goes i think far beyond UX.. it's about content matching user intent over the keywords used for search.. where psychology, linguistics and SEO find a path together.. of course an ecommerce goal is to sell, but it can be achieved also by answering people questions.. thanks for this great WBF!

I would disagree on the exact match domains though - If you want to find information about Harvard the best place is still going to be harvard.edu. There are a lot of examples like that and it is going to take a lot of convincing that harvard.edu is NOT the best place to find out about harvard!

I like the approach - if you want to rank for Fuji Apples, then make the site about Apples, and then go all in on the sub pages about Fuji and Golden Delicious etc. Ranking for the global term ostensibly, but in fact going for the sub-terms. Plus you take the high ground and can quite honestly say, Hey, don't look at me - this is a non-commercial site - it's about apples. That works very well on a number of different levels.

Great whiteboard friday rand on a topic that has not gotten very much attention. My 2 take aways from this are that I am.certain that realsimple.com has made a deal with the devil over its keyword ranking and secondlyrics the level at which Google can track our activity as we navigate the Internet and make correlations between where we go and where we want to go is progressin at an al arming rate.

As always this rocks and what I took from it was not to only focus on one topic or keyword but look beyond the horizon and seek out the recognition of keywords and content that represents one subject as a whole. All of the examples show that Google is getting smarter from the consumer or searchers point of view trying to provide the best search experience and as an SEO it is my duty to ensure that my client sites can drive traffic from all avenues keeping bounce rates low and conversion rates high. Getting visitors to the site is one thing but really keeping there is what Google is recognizing as valuable.

You culminate this discussion saying that Google would like more sites to emulate what these big brands are doing. I feel with the kind of competition for SERP positions these days, isn't Google giving power in the hands of the selective few? Wouldn't these so called "Big Brands" call all the shots and eventually lead to selling of links/other referral media from them to other smaller players. A small brand, no matter how good would never stand a chance to compete with them. Seems a bit unfair...doesn't it ?

I personally understand sites like Wiki that rank among the top SERPs, but they are non-profit and seem to be wanting to share information rather than capture SERPs.

Here is what I am trying to say, BMW makes one of the best cars in the world. But, if tomorrow they start making phones, is there any guarantee that they will make the best phones?

Google has to stay impartial when it comes to ranking sites. I would prefer MetaCritic for Gaming Ratings/Reviews, IMDB/Rottentomatoes for Movie Ratings. But, if they start doing something which is not their niche or start a new offering, they should be treated as a new site altogether for that particular offering.

Actually, that's exactly what this type of evaluation does - it means that if Metacritic gets into reviewing linens or BMW makes phones, it will take a lot of work on their part to build up associations between those brands and those queries - they won't just get the raw benefit of being powerful domains and thus rank for anything/everything. This is part of what happened when Google started to bias against the behemoth content factories created by folks like Demand Media.

A perfect WBF to accompany (or should I say pre-accompany ;) the presentation done by @jasonmillerCA of LinkedIn last week at #INBOUND14. I know this comment is a little late!! He had some great ideas and tips on 'owning' your conversation and "story you want to tell" - as well as developing that idea through your content strategy. If you take the tips and insight you mention above for keyword relevance and semantic search, and add that to his ideas of content strategy development - you'll see that the two of them compliment and marry each other perfectly!

With keyword relevance, you want your brand to associate and rank organically for your 'set' of KW target terms, drawing signals from resources from all over the web to signal the correlation between the keyword searched, user intent, social and content signals.

As Jason said at Inbound, "The Key Ingredient to a Better Content Experience, is Relevance". I think you hit the nail right on the head!

If case you missed Jason's talk at #INBOUND14, his Slidedeck is here (and available for anyone to see.) It helped me a whole heap in terms of looking at new and more interesting ways to develop content strategy for the agency and clientel. Of course, his premise was 'not more content, but more relevant content' - which I think compliments your WBF today.

Thanks again Rand! Always great stuff. I'd love to pick your brain at a much more in depth level sometime when I'm in Seattle!

As someone who was pretty good at using the EMD's in the past. http://bit.ly/1typwcy. It's pretty obvious that in 2014 being an authority or getting good in bound authority links is the way to GO. I still think if you can "Theme" your site around a few popular search phrases you will do ok. Happy Friday

First of all, "Awesome hair style". You made a mark with that in your presentation. Coming to the topic, this WBF can be linked to what Gianluca Fiorelli mentioned in his last friday WBF on entity based optimization. The brand relevance with the search queries relate to entity relationship. So, I think all we need to do is to check with freebase data as per our niche and then optimize for the related ones to have advantage in search results. Ontology some where comes into importance in optimization. As famous biologist said "Ontogeny re-capitulates Phylogeny". But, I have a question, recently their was some news on Google Knowledge Vault. These would be something based on refined and validated data sets. What if some domain captures the maximum queries verified by knowledge vault, wouldn't that be too tough for the new players to get into the existing vault?

Great point Amit! I agree on the hair style and would love to hear Rand's answer on that question. On another note, this is the point where we have to be experts on keyword and persona analysis. Being able to properly identify stages in the buying process and tailor strategies around it to get as Rand said broad recognition and rank for all keywords on the topic.

Thank you Rand! I really loved hearing your views on the shifting paradigm in our industry. Entity based search is here and it feels like we're trying to learn to swim. Your advice was very insightful.

I'm interested to see how others are reporting on increased relevance. How do we show our clients that we are becoming increasingly relevant towards a particular keyword group/ developing new associations? (Besides aggregate rankings of course)

Again in Whiteboard Friday, you covered a valuable topic all the time. Please share something again about, How To Answer Clients questions like - I want ranking on the first page for my all desired keywords? why we have to spen on SEO if you are not committing ranking.

Please cover this topic again so that we can handle these situation with a strong point, and even non technical person can understand it well. Because so many service providers are still facing same problem.

We've been doing this for quite some time. We haven't done it aggressively, but it's part of the branding process. Because all the algorithms Google launches regularly, it's a risky thing to use the good ol' exact match anchor text. So we decided to use our brand name for an anchor, but the keywords are always somewhere around. This way we are doing some good co-citations and slowly, but surely, Google starts to assimilate the brand with the keywords.

It's not only the links, but the onsite content and social signals.

Has anyone experimented with Google search? What if 100 different people start searching "keywords + your brand" for a while. Could this change the results? Could this help Google decide which sites/brands it will show to the next person who searches for the main keyword? We don't have the manpower for such an experiment, but if some of you have tried it, please share some insights.

But brands are the future and exact match domains don't work so much. Probably for small keywords with small competition, it could work. But if you are targeting something big, you will need a brand and marketing, not only SEO.

Since the Google updates last year; Google's search results have become brand biased I believe. Websites which have a very good brand presence offline/online are ranking highly for generic and long-tail search phrases. This has pushed the other smaller competitors down the search results and out of customers sight. I believe this is un-healthy exercise as Google should promote better competition.

Brands are great for research and information queries as they have the knowledge and understanding of the industry. Brands already have a very high rate of branded traffic from Direct/referral/Search; whereas other smaller competitors only rely on search traffic for their presence. By over powering first page results with brands and lowering the competitors Google is not giving customers the opportunity to check out what others have to offer make a better purchase decision. If this continues and brands dominate the first page space as is current with most financial/insurance related search terms; I'm skeptical to see whether SEO's will become brand managers?

I'm sure Google's dominance for brands is not air for the customer as brands are not always the best solution and there are other better options available. Google needs to find the right balance when promoting brands and better competition!!

First of all, your this new "Australian" hair cut is super cool! You're looking like a dude!

Coming to the topic, I reckon this theory will only gonna work with the BIG names. Correct me if I'm wrong, being SEOs can't we target those specific search queries that these BIG names don't have any answers as you highlighted? If we create great content and successfully market it on all the channels, I think we can outrank them.

Yes it is right that Google gives preference to keyword related domain Buy why Google do it. This thing irritate me a lot because i am trying to rank in "Corporate Flyer" Keyword in India but there is a Domain with this name and he is ranking on top from the past few year,

Great points you have covered here. I am agree with you on this, infect I was searching the solutions for Brand biasing and now I know how Google is going to judge this things. Taking care of these things will surely build up our brand association.

I know right? I am amazed at the amount of spam forum replies Rand gets here. These carry so little value (especially for non-topical websites) that I think it might be time for a quick 101 on the (lack of) value of blog comment spam. Sheesh people!